Gone But Not Forgotten
by illuminata79
Summary: A long time after her departure, Mick's Nell is still remembered very fondly.


This is a little sketch that popped into my mind almost fully formed when my last holiday took me back to the raggedly beautiful Pointe Saint-Mathieu (or, in Breton, Beg Lokmazhe), the place in and around which the Nell episodes of Mick's life story were set.

Just a short story to show that Nell has not been forgotten decades and decades after her untimely death.

* * *

_Saint-Mathieu, June 2004_

I am walking the path that I have walked a million times, in a forceful wind that tears at my clothes, as it often does hereabouts.

I pull my cap down on my brow to make sure it won't be swept away with the breeze and continue along the dusty dirt path, jingling the loose coins in my pocket as I go.

A young couple in brightly coloured windbreakers stand aside to let me pass, then a family with three noisy kids and a yapping dog approaches, the mother scolding the eldest who sullenly keeps walking and almost collides with me, while the harassed-looking father tries to drag the dog away from bits of junk some fools have carelessly thrown into the grass at the edge of the path.

I know full well that all those tourists are supposed to be good for this region that has been poor for centuries, the home of fishermen and small farmers. Even today, many of the young folks are leaving to go to university and to work in the big cities, and there would be even more of them draining away if it wasn't for the tourist industry.

I still reserve the right to dislike the hordes of colourfully clad foreigners clambering over the rocks and milling about the ruins of the abbey with their guidebooks and their expensive cameras, or crowding the village streets where they shamelessly take pictures of everyone and everything they see without even having the courtesy to ask permission, as if us locals were just part of the pretty scenery instead of people who might want to keep a bit of privacy.

They trample the heather and leave their rubbish behind and talk back rudely when you dare to remind them that they had better take it home with them or at least to the nearest wastebasket, and they have no respect for holy places, shouting through the chapel and complaining that the paint is peeling off the wall and the lighting is too bad to take a good picture.

But this time, I'm lucky, maybe because the weather is a bit rough for June, at least if you're a coddled city dweller.

There are just a few cars in the big parking lot at the abbey, and when I walk through the large quarrystone arch and cross the square to enter the chapel, I am alone in there. I dig up two of those newfangled coins from my pocket and make sure they are both one-Euro pieces before I push them through the slot in the offertory box. I still can't get used to that funny currency, and I wouldn't want to pull a fast one on the Church, even if it wasn't on purpose.

I kneel down on the hard stone step in front of the altar rail, select a candle from the cardboard box below the iron rack and carefully light it, holding it in my hand for a moment, looking at the little flame that trembles in a draught of wind as I say a quick but heartfelt prayer for her.

I put the candle on the stand where a row of lights in little red plastic cups are already flickering and get another, as I always do, again pausing for a moment to pray before I set it on the rack and awkwardly struggle to my feet to sit in the front pew for a moment.

I don't like to admit it, but these days I don't move as easily as I used to. My left knee in particular is creaking worse than ever.

Well, a long time ago, I came pretty damn close to losing that leg, so I quickly tell myself I'd better be grateful that it's still there to give me aches and pains.

It has done its job all right for those past sixty years, and while things certainly haven't improved with old age, it still allows me to do my work around the house and garden and to shoot a few _boules _on the village _pétanque_ field with a couple of pals on Sunday afternoons, so I guess I shouldn't complain too loudly.

I might just as well not have come home at all and ended up a name carved in stark black letters into the ugly white marble plaque they put up at the foot of the '14-'18 war memorial outside the church after the other war was over.

Like Simon Dupré, the bastard who ruined my sister's life.

I couldn't have said I was sorry when Marie came over all tearful when I happened to be on home leave and wordlessly showed me some official letter saying her son, Sergeant Simon Édouard Dupré, had been killed in action.

It had seemed only fair that he, who had set off the chain of events that eventually cost my sister's life and that of her unborn baby, should not live to see old age either.

If I'm honest, that's what I'm thinking still.

I am eighty-four years old now, which means that she would have been eighty-eight in March.

_That_ would have been a good age to die.

Not the twenty she had been that horrible day when I ran all the way to the little cove by the fort to find nothing more of her than her shoes and a short desperate note of goodbye.

But then, life simply_ isn't_ fair, and it will always happen that bright and beautiful young people die in the prime of their lives while old folks like me drag on and on, sometimes for so long that you begin wondering if God has forgotten all about them.

I might well have met an early death, too. When the course of the world took a turn for the worse in 1939, I was neither interested in the politics nor keen on going to fight in that war, but all my buddies went, and I figured it was as good a way as any to get away from home.

By that time, my mother had completely descended into the unfathomable depths of madness following the incomprehensible loss of my sister, and my father, well, he was the same old tyrant he had always been.

So I went to war, occasionally came home on leave, spent three months in hospital to recover from the shot I'd taken through the calf, went back into battle again, and somehow hung in there, seeing way too many comrades fall until, after six long years, it finally was over.

I came back to find the tyrant had been killed in a storm off the coast, and again, I didn't feel very sorry.

Between them, he and Simon had destroyed my sister's chance at a happy long life.

I have never forgiven either of them.

Nor have I ever forgotten my sister, the earnest girl with the smooth brown hair and pretty blue-grey eyes, the girl who had been Gwenna to me for almost as long as she lived but whom I have chosen to remember as Nell, the name she had been affectionately given by the man she should have married.

I have often thought about him in all those years, feeling somewhat cheated of the lifelong friendship I assume we would have shared if things had not gone so wrong.

Even now I sometimes wonder if he is still alive and how his life panned out after Nell.

Of course, it is rather unlikely that he's still around, considering that he was at least six or seven years my senior. On the other hand, nowadays people often live to see their ninetieth birthday and more, so perhaps he did, too.

Much as I would have liked to see him again, I can't blame him for never touching base.

He had been in a hurry to leave this place after hearing what had come to pass during his long stint at sea, and I think all he wanted was to get out and forget about all those awful events.

I do hope he did not forget about Nell entirely, though.

But then, I don't think he did. He wasn't the kind to forget a woman he had loved so much.

I have never regretted giving him our only print of her lovely portrait photo. I am convinced he kept it safe, even if he probably hitched up with another woman at some point.

Honestly, I do hope he found himself a nice lady.

Life is better not lived all alone, I say, and I'm very grateful to the Lord above that I still have my Claudette, fifty-seven years after our wedding day.

And for fifty-seven years, she has been putting up with me repeating all the old stories over and over – of the childhood Nell and I shared, teaming up to bear the burden of living with a disturbed mother and the moody, violent man I have long ago stopped calling Father, of the pranks and adventures I cooked up with my pals from the village, and of Nell's courtship with a darkly attractive American sailor who, for some reason, had begun to work with Jean-Luc Villiers on his fishing boat.

Mick, he had been called. Mick Carpenter.

He had never enjoyed great popularity with the villagers, but I have always thought that rather stupid, for Mick was neither stuck-up nor overbearing, as many villagers claimed he was.

On the contrary, he deliberately kept a low profile and tried to fit in as best as he could, but most villagers had made up their minds about him the moment he arrived on the scene with his longish black curls and his fine sharp face whose cautiously pensive expression might have been mistaken for arrogance by someone who didn't know him.

I knew him well enough to see he really was a soul of a man. He didn't speak much, partly because he was ashamed of his faulty French, but he was a good guy who cared deeply for my sister, never flinched at my mother's peculiarities and even faced down my father when he found out that he had struck Nell's cheek so hard that the bruise showed for days. If I had ever wanted her to marry anyone, it was him.

Still, the gossips had a field day when Nell got engaged to him (that would never work, she would see what came of marrying a stranger, he was not even a Catholic), when he went away to work on some overseas carrier (he was never going to come back, all his talk of making more money to buy a small house when he came back was just a hoax that the poor silly girl was too lovestruck to see through), when she married that Dupré piece of _merde_ because the old man forced her to (now that foreigner actually had left her in the lurch with a little bun in the oven, and how good of young Simon to take care of her) and, most of all, when she drowned herself out of sheer desperation. I will not repeat any of the spiteful remarks they made about both Mick and Nell, for not a single one was true.

These old crones are long gone now, may they rot in hell, and hardly anyone recalls Gwenaëlle Kervennec's American, as he was known then, any more.

I don't mention him to anyone but Claudette, who's never laid eyes on him, and to my cousin Madeleine who remembers him fondly. She was just a little girl of eight or nine when Nell introduced them to each other, and I don't know how often she has wondered wistfully what might have become of him, or bitterly lamented having lost the small owl he had carved for her from a piece of driftwood.

"He was such a beautiful man, and so sweet with me when others would have been miffed about that kid intruding on a private moment between lovers", she says often, and she always adds with a heavy sigh, "I only hope he survived that war." So do I.

It has become my habit on Sundays to take a little walk to the headland before I go play _pétanque_ in the village square, as I have done today, to remember Mick and to remember Nell among the ruins of the abbey, by the lighthouse, in the chapel.

Although she has been gone for almost seventy years, I still feel close to her when I am there to visit her favourite spot on this earth.

The old abbey complex was where she would go when she needed a break from home. It was where she often met her love, and it was where she stood up to our father in defence of her plans and her wishes.

It was also where Father Duval, bless his heart, saved her life the first time she attempted to put an end to it. Little did we all think it would not be long until she tried again, and without anyone around to dissuade her.

When the pew gets all too uncomfortable and the memories too painful, I rise from the narrow wooden seat where I have been sitting for a while, contemplating the candles I have just lit as I always do, one for Nell and her baby and one for my mother who finally faded away a couple of years after the war.

I genuflect in front of the altar a little clumsily and cross myself before I leave the chapel.

Now it's time for the other half of my Sunday ritual, the small detour I make every time, back through the parking lot and down the cobbled path they have laid a while ago for the tourists, complete with signposts and explanations on little enamelled plaques.

The path leads me past the tiny pond which the monks are said to have used to wash their laundry, along the edge of the steep cliff at whose foot the water is eternally crashing and swirling and roaring, and on from there to a concrete platform enclosed by a low wall.

The high, slender granite column on the platform is where I'm headed. It has various ornaments carved into its sides and a sad woman's head on top, forever looking plaintively out over the ocean, a very appropriate image to crown this memorial erected in honour of sailors lost at sea.

I stand next to the towering monument and touch a hand to its rough surface while I follow the mournful woman's gaze towards the horizon, behind which, thousands of miles away, lies America.

Thinking fondly and a little mournfully of the first American I ever knew, I whisper under my breath, "God bless you, _mon ami, _wherever you are."


End file.
